471: Mailbag 1/8/21

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Speaker 1: This is the Labor Podcast with your host JJ zacher Retha j J. Zacher reson What's up everyone. It's JJ Zachares and the editor in chief at FanDuel and at Number five dot com in this episode four hundred and seventy one of the Late Round podcast so many shows that are part of the FanDuel podcast network. Thanks for tuning in. Before getting to the mailbag questions this week, I want to let you know that Fandel's Sportsbook is making sure you have the opportunity to get in on the action over Wildcard weekend with some of the best possible odds on the market. Right now, new users can wager up to five dollars on any team to win their Wildcard, divisional or conference championship game at plus twenty five hundred odds. That's right, A five dollars bet on any team to win any game before the Super Bowl can win you one hundred and twenty five dollars. Download the Fandel Sportsbook app and make your first deposit to see the enhanced odds today. Must be twenty one years or older in president in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Colorado, West Virginia, Tennessee, Iowa or Indiana. New users only must wager on designated boost market deposit required max bonus one hundred and twenty five dollars. See full terms at sportsbook dot fanl dot com. Gambling problem called one hundred gambler in Colorado called one hundred five to two to forty seven hundred and West Virginia is at one hundred gambler dot net and Indiana call one hundred and nine with it in Tennessee called Tennessee redline one hundred eight nine nine seven eight nine. The first question this week is from at Ikeasar, what do you make of a top heavy season with no offseason? Then he goes on to list some statistics. It says, in twenty twenty, we had nine one thousand yard rushers. In twenty nineteen, there were sixteen of them. In twenty twenty, we had ten players with a minimum of two hundred carries. In twenty nineteen, we had twenty players with a minimum of two hundred carries. In twenty twenty, we had eighteen one thousand yard wide receivers and nine of them had twelve hundred yards. In twenty nineteen we had twenty nine one thousand yard receivers, but only five of them had twelve hundred yards. So what does this all mean? That's what the questions asking, and honestly, I don't make much of it. I think this is a good example of why we should very rarely draw conclusions based on one season or one season versus the season that happened prior. For instance, you note that there were nine one thousand yard rushers, there were eight at running back, and then there was Lamar Jackson. In twenty nineteen there were sixteen of them, but in twenty eighteen there were nine of them. In twenty seventeen there were also nine of them, and twenty sixteen there were twelve. So, if anything, it doesn't make twenty twenty look weird, it makes twenty nineteen look weird, which we kind of knew. Twenty nineteen was a really good year for running backs and it was a good year for drafting running backs early in fantasy football. If elite running backs are doing well and they're staying healthy, then there's a higher chance that more yards are going to singular players because those dominant running backs demand a larger workload. So there are a multitude of reasons that shifts like This can happen year over year, but I think it's always important to recognize when first off, arbitrary cutoffs are being used, because these are arbitrary cutoffs. But you need more of a sample to really push forth any sort of explanation, Like at a high level, given the scoring that we saw this year, you could at least offer up the idea that the lack of preseason and reps probably benefited offenses more than defenses. We saw that during the near lockout season about ten years ago, especially at the start of the year, but a lot of individual player milestones within a really small snapshot. It can be explained by injury to top players and simple variants. I wouldn't think too much of it, especially since twenty twenty matches more closely with other seasons than twenty nineteen did. If anything, twenty nineteen is not the norm. It looks like more of the outlier, and we sort of knew that entering the year. This last question is from at Sincy Underscore Valentine what happened to Cam Newton felt like the twenty twenty version of twenty nineteen, Lamarge Jackson first couple of games were fire than poof Yeah, so I remember answering a question about Cam during the middle of the season, and my stance and outlook really remains the same. At the start of the season, when Cam was putting together really good fantasy performances, he was mostly doing it with rushing. He had four rushing touchdowns after two games, and he had five rushing touchdowns after four games. The hope, then, moving forward is that Cam would improve as a passer. He would get in a groove throwing the ball and that would combat any regression that was coming on the ground. But that never happened. He actually got worse as a passer, So I think a couple of things were at play. Had he not had the rushing scores that he had to start the year, I doubt we would have ever had it in our head that Newton was going to be some beastly fantasy asset this year. I mean, aside from what we felt during the preseason and the upside that existed there. And keep in mind the comparison to Lamar Jackson that you made. Jackson had an absurdly good passing year efficiency wise in twenty nineteen, at least for fantasy purposes. I don't think that should have ever been in our range of outcomes for Cam Newton for a lot of reasons, and he didn't show that in Week one. He did have a good game against Seattle, but Seattle's defense was horrendous to start the year. But Cam was bound to regress as a rusher, and without the improvement as a passer, he turned into a less reliable fantasy asset. The SAS question is from at jph Underscore GSG. Do you do an autopsy on your teams that failed to meet expectations. I'm talking like a deep dive beyond just considering how transactions and spending were handled. If so, what do you look at to learn from for next season. I look back at all of my teams to see what went right and what went wrong. But yes, I definitely pay more attention to the teams that did poorly because that teaches you more. You learn more. I don't look at my teams that won fantasy titles that closely. Clearly I did something right, but usually when I look back, the general theme as to why I lost is pretty obvious. In one league this year, for example, I was forced to stream quarterbacks and I often didn't get the result that I wanted. I could have easily gone in the opposite direction with those quarterback choices, because plenty of quarterbacks were available. But Number one, it was a tough year for quarterback streaming. Number Two, variants hit in the wrong way for me. That's gonna happen. Sometimes there's a simple explanation. Though, I was third in points in one league this year, and I missed the playoffs. I lost four games by two or fewer points, and there wasn't a spot in the playoffs for most points not in so I didn't get in. That type of bad luck happens. But I think overall, there are probably two big things to remember when you go through this exercise of understanding what went wrong in your leagues. One is whether or not you successfully strategized for the type of league structure that you were playing in. Sometimes you realize after the fact, man, this league really really benefits having a stud quarterback. Sometimes you don't totally capture that when you're entering a draft, even if you think that you do. You have to embrace the fact that your strategy and what you're studying going into a draft that might be wrong. The second thing, though, is that higher level trends, the stuff that I talk about on this show during the offseason, that's still gonna help you with future drafts more than seeing that you picked up the wrong guy off the waiver wire one given week. Even if you're in two or three leagues, that's still a pretty small sample size. You should be looking at things at a macro level, not just the micro one, even though looking at the micro one can still help you. Just don't lose sight of that macro level while you're picking off reasons as to why you lost. This US course is from at Stags too. How much do you think a new quarterback will help James Robinson and how will that affect his draft position? So I think James Robinson is probably gonna be one of the most polarizing players in fantasy football this offseason. You guys know that I'm a believer in him the player, and I don't buy into this idea that his undrafted free agent status now makes him an obvious cell case end it, because he's already proven that he's an outlier with what he did this year. But with that being said, Jacksonville is likely to get some running back help this offseason. They didn't have that much running back depth, and there's no way Robinson maintains the type of backfield share that he was seeing in year one, or at least it's going to be really really hard for him too. Now, that doesn't automatically make him a sell. The market dictates whether you should sell a player or not. And to the point of the question, the market's going to dictate whether you should go after Robinson with a clear upgrade at quarterback. And yes, hypothetically a new quarterback should help Robinson, but you're not gaining any sort of informational edge by knowing there's going to be an upgrade for Jacksonville. I would argue that backfield share regression could easily wipe out any sort of upgrade that we're gonna see from Jacksonville at the quarterback position. That's not necessarily a bad thing, because Robinson was a really good fantasy asset this year. I'm just saying that an upgrade at quarterback for James Robinson that doesn't automatically mean that he's going to be a better fantasy asset in twenty twenty one, because despite the crappy offense that he was in, he actually had it pretty good. Because volume drives so much in fantasy football. But the thing is with this question, we're not gonna know how a quarterback change will affect James Robinson's draft position because we don't know what his draft position is gonna be before the quarterback upgrade. It's not like people were going into drafts thinking that Gardner Minshew is Jacksonville's quarterback. Moving forward, we know what's about to happen. We know there's like a ninety nine percent chance, probably even higher, that Trevor Lawrence is going to be Jacksonville's quarterback. Of course, something could change, maybe he doesn't want to go to Jacksonville, maybe he pulls an Eli Manning. But even still, Jacksonville's going to go after a quarterback. There's likely going to be a quarterback upgrade. But I think my answer to this question, if I were to sum it all up, is that if your expectation is Robinson can only get better because of a quarterback upgrade, I don't think that's right because even though he was good and eve, even though I very much have been a believer in James Robinson the player, I have to recognize that his volume is going to be very hard to sustain this last questions from at s FoST zero four two nine. Biggest fraud of the season aka, who is someone who was top ten extra points for top five this season at their position that won't be top thirty next season outside the top thirty in positional scoring or I'm assuming this is positional scoring. That's kind of tough. That's a huge drop if we don't assume injury. I'm gonna look at points per game for this question, and I'm gonna look at players who played at least half of their teams games this year, and right there at RB ten and points per game is Miles Gaskin. I don't think Gaskin is bad. I just could see a path to the Dolphins bringing in another running back, even though I personally don't think that's a necessary thing to do. And that's how you immediately get bumped from being a top ten guy when you're active to being more top three to being an RB three. At wide receiver, I think my answer would be Tyler Lockett. Wide Receiver's really tough because the top ten wide receivers this year are all really good. But even though the Seahawks are going to throw touchdowns at a higher than normal rate with Russell Wilson under center, It's not hard to see that Lockett could have been far, far worse this year without a couple of blow up games. If those blow up games don't happen, we don't get the same Tyler Lockett. And if touchdown variants isn't on his side this year, maybe he falls a bit. It's not like I'm gonna rank him that low, but I could at least see it. This next question is an email for Mike, which, by the way, you can email me questions during the offseason for these mailbag shows. My emails JJ at number fire dot com. But it says, HEYJJ, thanks for viewing this question. I remember seeing yards per team pass attempt as a new marker for prospects. Is this because it's a step closer to yards per route run, making it a closer indicator to production. So I've been using yards per team pass attempt to my model for a few years now, and I actually use it with players in the NFL too. It doesn't really have anything to do with yards per route run though, there's just some predictive power to it because it sort of blends a lot of different metrics into one, like, think about what this statistic is yards per team pass attempt. You're looking at culative yards, which is a volume statistic, and volume is sticky year over year, and you're relating it to a player's team, and that allows the metric to be sort of a market share one. And then it's also sort of an efficiency based one because it's a fraction. Now it's not flawless, but it's gotten signaling my models, and it's a big part of my models. And for the record, I'm not close to the person who came up with this. I know that some of the guys at Rotoviz they've been messing with this metric for years. And then Anthony Amiko, who did a show with me a while back on prospecting through Data, he uses it too. I just got around to messing around with it and I saw its power. This last question is from at K Spearing eight planning to start up a dynasty league this year. Does the late round quarterback strategy still apply there? Or do you adjust for an anticipated shortage of streamers and lock down a multi year starter earlier than you would in redraft slash keeper? So the late round quarterback strategy really came about because of the number of usable quarterbacks you could take late in drafts, but that stem from the supply and demand of the position. You only need one quarterback in most fantasy football leagues, so teams aren't typically reaching to get one, and there were always quarterbacks available late usable quarterbacks. That fact doesn't totally change in a dynasty format. Yeah, you can't effectively stream, but you're also going to be rostering more quarterbacks, so you can get away with having a platoon rather than having a stud because remember, when you get a stud, there's an opportunity cost involved there. You're missing out on studs at running back and wide receiver, and those are more important positions for your team build. So the quick and dirty answer here is that yes, you can still wait, and honestly, sometimes it's more advantageous because people seem to think that because it's dynasty, you need to have this long lasting quarterback. You need Kyler Murray, you need Joe Burrow, you need these guys who are gonna be around for a really long time. But that's not true. You don't need a flawless team to win fantasy football championships. But because people think this way, it sometimes becomes even more advantageous to wait because those people are pushing down running back and wide receivers to better spots and drafts. So yes, still wait. You obviously still have to be reactive to what's going on so that you're not starting Sam Darnold every week, But there are a lot of good young quarterbacks in the league right now. There's no need to reach. That's gonna know. For today's show, though, Thanks to all of you for listening. If you've got subscribed to the Late Round podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcast can be found, and don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks everyone, enjoy your weekend and I'll talk to you next week